On the morning of her last day alive, Tía Reina awoke with a halo of bright pink aligning her forehead. “A fever,” she told us. “It will pass.” What she didn’t know then was that she had become a saint overnight (this we learned posthumously, after consulting a couple...
The astronaut pushes a wire cart through the supermarket. Their body is obscured beneath the thick, radiation-proof fabric. Their face hides behind the mirrored shield opaque enough to block the sun. We decide to assume the astronaut is a she, for women make better...
1. The fourth-grade mothers learn that one of the fourth-grade girls, Jade, is missing. Their sons and daughters announce this at the dinner tables. The children are reluctant to provide the news. Nothing like this has happened before, and they don’t know how the...
My daughter’s walking me through her sandcastle. She brings me in through the garage weight room, which opens up into a two-story climbing wall. Before I can test that out, my wife, Anna, yells for me to come see the downstairs bathroom. Kaylee has crafted one of...
After she gave birth, she could hardly sleep because she was either leaking milk or blood, or both at the same time or because she heard every sound the baby made—the widening of his thin lips while dreaming of a past life to his little fingers opening from a fist...
Clouds like spores riding the gusts of wind, still raining, no beach today. We're lying on the couch together, heads on opposite ends, my smooth legs sliding over his brittle, hairy shins. He wants to feed me yogurt, but I can't reach. I stick my tongue out, then open...
When I grew breasts, I stopped taking the bus to school. Instead I walked along the edge of the wetlands that protruded like a dank finger between my home and school. It was seven and a half times longer than the walk to the bus stop, but it was safer to be alone....
Let’s say they believed her. Let’s say she was born into a different age. That she wasn’t the one who burned. Or: Maybe in another life, she is the favorite camp counselor. She teaches the kids to ride horseback. She tells them to get back up when they fall. She wipes...
We carry out the unction for our aging father on the dining room table, anointing him with a variety of substances: stale lake water, ripe oil that dripped down the jagged walls of caves back home, that spiced, buttery potion that our mother makes just like her own...
I ran over a nightjar with my car. It wasn’t my fault—it sat there roosting in the right lane of the road. I was on the phone with my brother when it happened; he’s apprenticing in ear-nose-throat. He’d changed rotations, went straight there from gyno. They’re all...
For two years now, Leonard’s wife hasn’t wanted to have sex with him. He figures it might have to do with her mother passing, or maybe it’s because both their kids are in college and the house is empty. Maybe it’s biological. He has no idea. Hell, for all he knows, it...
The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl...